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Ecology

Intro

Destroying the world

If you took all the people in the world and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farm animals—cows, pigs, sheep and chickens—and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals—from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales—is less than 100 million tons.

Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; 50 million penguins compared with 50 billion chickens; 250,000 chimpanzees—in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.

The wild giraffes and penguins have no reason to be jealous of the domesticated cows and chickens, though. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, domesticated species are an amazing success story. They are the most widespread animals in the world. Unfortunately, this evolutionary perspective fails to take into account individual suffering. Domesticated cows and chickens may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is one of the most important lessons of history.

Lectures

Articles

The Worst Crime in History

Today, the majority of large animals on planet earth are domesticated farm animals that live and die as cogs in the wheels of industrial agriculture. Earth is home to about 7 billion humans, weighing together about 300 million tons. It is also home to several dozen billion farm animals – cows, pigs, chickens and so forth – whose total biomass is about 700 millions tons. In contrast, if you took all the large wild animals left on earth – all the penguins, baboons, alligators, dolphins, wolves, tune fish, lions and elephants – and put them on a very large scale, they will weigh together less than 100 million tons.

The disappearance of wildlife is a calamity of unprecedented magnitude, but the plight of the planet’s majority population—the farm animals—is cause for equal concern. In recent years there is growing awareness of the conditions under which these animals live and die, and their fate may well turn out to be the greatest crime in human history. If you measure crimes by the sheer amount of pain and misery they inflict on sentient beings, this radical claim is not implausible.

It is undeniable that the regime of modern industrial agriculture is designed to the benefit of humankind, and that the animals inevitably end their lives in the slaughterhouse. But isn’t this regime beneficial in many ways to the animals too? Aren’t cows and chickens better off under human care? After all, they get all the food, water and shelter they need, without making the least effort. They are similarly protected against predators and diseases. And though it is certainly painful for a chicken to end its life slaughtered by a human, how is it worse than being slaughtered in the wild by a fox or an eagle?

To understand why this line of thinking is flawed, and why the condition of domesticated animals is uniquely miserable, we need to rely on the insights of the new science of evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, the main problem with industrial agriculture is not the slaughter or exploitation of animals, but the disregard of their subjective needs.

Ever since the Agricultural Revolution, the living conditions of domesticated animals have been determined by two main factors:

The need to ensure the survival and reproduction of the animals. If the work-horse dies of exhaustion, or the dairy cow produces no calves, this is bad news for the farmers, who will soon find themselves without milk and without someone to pull their carts and plows.

In theory, the need to ensure the survival and reproduction of the animals should have safeguarded their well-being. But this is not so in practice. First, farmers don’t need to ensure the survival and reproduction of all animals. All too often, it pays to exploit a work-horse until it dies, and then just buy a new one. Even more importantly, whereas human agriculture has an interest in ensuring the survival and reproduction of farm animals, it has no built-in interest to provide for their emotional and social needs, unless these needs are essential for survival and reproduction.

But how can animals have emotional or social needs that are not essential for survival and reproduction? Doesn’t the theory of evolution argue that needs evolve only if they contribute something to survival and reproduction? Here we reach the heart of the problem. According to evolutionary psychology, the emotional and social needs of cows and chickens evolved for millions of years in the wild, when they were indeed indispensable for survival and reproduction. Yet over the last few thousand years-the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms-humans have created an artificial regime of agriculture, which enables animals to survive and reproduce even when their emotional and social needs are ignored. However, animals continue to feel these emotional and social needs, and if these are not fulfilled, the animals suffer greatly.

For example, cattle is a social animal, and cows and bulls in the wild must know how to communicate and cooperate in order to find food, evade dangers, find mates and rear offspring. Young calves must therefore learn the norms and taboos of cattle society, or they will fail to survive and reproduce. Calves, like the young of all other social mammals, acquire the necessary social skills through play. Evolution has accordingly implanted calves with a strong desire to play, and calves—just like puppies, kittens and human children—spend much time playing and fooling around if you only give them the chance. What happens if we now lock a young calf in an isolated cage; give him food, water and medications; and when he matures we extract his sperm and inseminate a cow? From an objective perspective, the calf no longer needs to play and form social ties with other cattle in order to survive and reproduce. But from a subjective perspective, the calf still feels a very strong urge to play and form social ties. If this urge is not fulfilled, the calf will suffer greatly. For a need shaped by millions of years of evolution in the wild continues to be felt by domesticated animals even when it is no longer necessary for their survival and reproduction in industrial farms.

At this point one might ask whether animals really have emotions and desires at all. Perhaps we imagine that they feel things – like a desire to play – because we erroneously humanize them? However, ascribing feelings to calves does not humanize them. It merely “mammalianize” them, which is entirely permissible, because they are mammals. Feelings and emotions are mechanisms that evolved in all mammals in order to encourage adaptive behaviors. The areas in the human brain which are related to basic emotions like fear, anger and mother-infant bonding are very similar to those we find in other mammals.

Indeed, the very definition of mammals is based on the loving bond between mother and offspring. The name “mammal” is taken from the mammary gland, which secrets milk. A mammalian mother has such love for her offspring, that she literally nourishes them with her own body, and they cannot survive without her. A mammalian mother who for some reason feels no love for her offspring, or an offspring that feels no attachment to the mother, are unlikely to leave their DNA for posterity.

The centrality of emotions for mammals have been proved already back in the 1950s, in a series of famous and heart-wrenching experiments conducted by the American psychologist Harry Harlow. Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers several hours after birth. The monkeys were isolated inside small cages, in each of which Harlow placed one infant monkey and two “dummy mothers”. One was made of metal wires, and was fitted with a milk bottle from which the infant monkey could suck. The other was made of wood covered with cloth, which made her resemble a real monkey mom, but it provided the infant monkey with no food whatsoever.

In the 1950s the psychological study of all animals, including even humans, was dominated by the behaviorist school. Behaviorism discounted the importance of emotions, and argued that behavior is shaped mainly by material needs such as food and shelter. Hence it was assumed that the infant monkeys would cling to the nourishing metal mother, while ignoring the barren cloth one. However, to everyone’s surprise, the infant monkeys showed a marked preference for the cloth mother, spending most of their time with her. When the two mothers were placed in close proximity, the infants held on to the cloth mother even while they reached over to suck milk from the metal mother.

Harlow suspected that perhaps the infants did so because they were cold. So he fitted an electric bulb inside the wire mother, which now radiated heat. Most of the infant monkeys continued to prefer the cloth mother. Follow-up research showed that Harlow’s orphaned monkeys grew up to be emotional wrecks even though they had received all the material needs they required. They never fitted into monkey society, had difficulties communicating with other monkeys, and suffered from high levels of anxiety and aggression.

The conclusion was inescapable: monkeys must have emotional needs and desires that go far beyond their material requirements, and if these are not fulfilled, the monkeys suffer greatly. Harlow’s infant monkeys preferred to spend their time in the hands of the barren cloth mother because they were looking for an emotional bond and not only for milk.

In the following decades, numerous studies showed that this conclusion applies not only to monkeys, but to other mammals, as well as birds and perhaps some reptiles and fish. It brought about a revolution not only in our understanding of animals, but even in our understanding of ourselves. Back in the 1950s, human children in orphanages were raised under a very strict regime that provided for their material needs, but discounted their emotional needs. Children were discouraged from playing and having too much contact with one another or with visitors, in order to curtail unruly behavior and to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The psychological results were calamitous. Today we know that to live a happy life, humans in general and children in particular need a lot of contact with others.

Yet even though we know this we continue to subject billions of domesticated animals to the same conditions as Harlow’s infant monkeys. Farmers routinely separate calves, kids and other youngsters from their mothers and playmates, to be raised in isolation. The dairy industry in particular is founded on the separation of offspring and mother. Cows, goats and sheep produce milk only after giving birth to calves, kids, and lambs, and only as long as the youngsters are suckling. To continue a supply of animal milk, a farmer needs the cow to produce calves, but must then prevent the calves from monopolizing the milk. In industrial dairy farms a milk cow usually lives for about five years before being slaughtered. During these five years she is almost constantly pregnant, and is fertilized within 60-120 days after giving birth in order to preserve maximum milk production. Her calves are separated from her shortly after birth. The females are reared to become the next generation of dairy cows, spending much of their childhood isolated in small cages in order to limit the danger of infectious diseases. The males are handed over to the care of the meat industry.

So yes, industrial agriculture takes care of the material needs of animals. But it has no intrinsic interest in their emotional and social needs. The result is suffering on a truly massive scale. It is debatable whether this is indeed the worst of all the crimes ever committed by humankind. But it is certainly something that should trouble us greatly.

Who domesticated humans?

Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.

That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. [i]

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks, and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped disks, arthritis, and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word “domesticate” comes from the Latin domus, which means “house.” Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return?